


The Truth About Giuseppe

by CryingKilljoy



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-03
Updated: 2016-08-03
Packaged: 2018-07-29 03:29:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 3,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7668412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CryingKilljoy/pseuds/CryingKilljoy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>right so there was this doll my friends and I worshiped in sixth grade who ended up ruining our lives so here's the story</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Backstory

This all started when I was in sixth grade.

My squad consisted of people I will call (for confidentiality purposes) Haglet, Herman, Hamilton, and Granny Smith, all of whom are girls. Haglet and Granny Smith don’t really like each other, but they’re forced to tolerate the other. At lunch, we all sat at one of the round tables in the cafeteria, and had a grand old time, despite not being the popular kids. We weren’t bullied, as this was a fairly strict private school, but people didn’t swarm around us at all points, which made us low-key enough to experience this storm in peace.

Now, in every grade there are bound to be those birthday parties where everyone is invited, whether that’s out of a desire for as many presents as possible, or a request from the parents, and I was invited to one of those. It was held at a bowling place with an adjacent arcade in which we got to play after the bowling and meal were finished.

The birthday girl’s dad gave us each some tokens to use in the arcade. I floated around, trying out a few games, until my token stash was depleted, at which point I floated around some more, watching people play. I was chilling with those third tier friends (the friends you don’t really like but pretend to like), as I didn’t know where the rest of my squad was, and this lasted until the birthday party ended.

Haglet and I, living almost in the same neighborhood, carpool lots of places together: school, swim meets, everywhere that we would go together. Naturally, we rode home together, and Haglet was telling me about how she and Granny Smith finally put aside their differences, and played a game together. They found that their only common interest was playing the game where you throw balls at clown stand-ups in the hopes that you can knock them down, and that they wanted to design a clown game of their own.

And that is where things went downhill.


	2. Innovation

Oftentimes when people want to do something wild like recreate a highly convoluted arcade game, that dream is forgotten within a few days, and it doesn’t usually return. It seemed as though that would be the case with the clown game, but when Granny Smith arrived late to lunch one day, we soon realized that surrendering was off the table.

Haglet, Herman, and I are the ones who do lots of things together: sleep over at each other’s houses, sit together everywhere, etc., and other people within the squad come and go as they please. Because of this, we assumed that Granny Smith was just trying out a new table for the day. That is, until we saw her stumbling into lunch with an odd lump under her shirt.

When she sat down at the table, she promptly pulled out the strange object. That strange object happened to be a tan, bean-shaped item, sewn together and filled with white stuffing. We were all very confused as to what this was, and frankly very horrified by its ugliness, and we demanded an explanation. Granny Smith informed us that this was one of the clowns for the clown game she and Haglet had planned to make. It was obvious that Haglet still craved to make the game, even though it would be a difficult task to achieve, so she dragged us into innovating the appearance of the weird bean-shaped thing.

We decided to name the doll Giuseppe. Herman was the one who decided on the name. Being an avid cartoon lover, she named it after a character from Cartoon Network’s _Adventure Time_ , who was just as disgusting as the doll we had made. Giuseppe sounded like a peculiar enough name for a peculiar enough specimen, so it was set.

 

During recess on Mondays and Wednesdays, the sixth graders are allowed to visit the library instead of the field. Inside of the library, there is a section behind some bookcases called the Maker Space, a section adorned with craft supplies and everything you’d need to construct something, which is where Granny Smith sewed Giuseppe’s body. Even before creating Giuseppe, we would opt to go there on the assigned days, but now we had a specific purpose: to innovate our doll.

I’m not very talented with sewing, so I stayed back and watched while Granny Smith started by constructing some clothes for Giuseppe. We only made one outfit, a purple striped V-neck sack that he wore to cover the bottom part of him (he had no arms or legs), all the way to around where the neck should be, like a kind of jumpsuit, if you will.

Then, we created features for him. Herman cut out grey diamonds for the eyeballs, and blue squares for the irises, and stuck the latter on top of the former. The nose was a red circle with a small string hanging down that resembled a nosebleed, and the mouth was red as well, except it looked kind of like an upside-down trapezoid, basically what normal lips look like.

Haglet and Herman worked together to put some hair on Giuseppe’s bald head, using purple and white strips of felt. Giuseppe had approximately two hairs of each color, so he basically still looked bald and as ugly as before, and that’s how Giuseppe remained.


	3. Kings of Middle Earth

In our squad, we had decided that certain figures would be our kings. We worshiped them wholeheartedly. They included:

 ** **Ferdinand**** (this is the name I gave to the guy in a video I saw on Instagram; the video features Ferdinand slamming all around his car while heavy metal plays in the background).

 ** **James Moriarty**** from BBC’s _Sherlock_.

 ** **Quanald**** (this is the name I gave to a picture of an eerie French fry statue).

****Shrignold**** , the butterfly from _Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared 3_.

 ** **Plaury**** (according to Herman, this is a character from a fanfiction whose title she will not tell me because it’s her personal meme).

 ** **Ping Ping**** (was the shortest man in the world until he died at some point; I forgot when)

 ** **Jerome**** the blobfish.

 ** **Dante**** the crab.

 ** **Tyrone and Pablo**** (the supposed Messiahs from a wild, fictional story another friend told us at a sleepover; there’s a debate within our squad as to who is the real Messiah; we have Team Tyrone and Team Pablo. I’m Team Tyrone because he was birthed out of an oil puddle in a parking lot, which is pretty rad).

We decided to add Giuseppe in, too, and he is forever cherished.


	4. Sacrifices

When you worship something as vile as Giuseppe, you’re not going to call him a sweet summer child of benevolence and prosperity. You’re going to call him the dark lord, which was what my squad did.

Giuseppe became the highlight of our lives, both within school and outside of school. We brought him to lunch every day, and often brought him at recess.

And it was at recess where we circled the track of the field, asking people if they would like to be sacrificed to the Dark Lord Giuseppe. We asked literally everyone, all the while plastering the biggest smiles ever to our faces. One kid, who was walking the track with his girlfriend (I don’t know why an eleven year-old needs a girlfriend, but whatever) responded, “Sorry, my only lord is God,” and I burst into laughter, my flagrantly atheistic self. The rest of the people stared suspiciously at us and Giuseppe. However, not all responses were negative, as one kid actually agreed to be sacrificed to our dark lord, and enthusiastically so.

Our first sacrifice! Wow, what an achievement! Needless to say, we were ecstatic for our dark lord.


	5. Giuseppe Table Games

As I mentioned before, Giuseppe was an important member of our lunch table committee. He didn’t have a chair of his own (we weren’t that childish, even if we were nothing less than wild, but that’s mostly because we were only allowed to have six chairs at a table, and it would probably be regarded as exclusive if we placed an inanimate object in someone’s potential spot; the school was all about inclusivity that year), but he was viewed as the star of the table.

After the table had been cleared from everyone’s meals, we would throw Giuseppe around among us. Through laughter and the occasional shriek when the doll was passed unexpectedly to someone, we were much louder than what was regularly condoned, and teachers told us we could continue playing only if we were quiet. Other people began to stare, too.

Some people at the table found it obnoxious, however.


	6. RadGiuseppe

When it had gotten to the point that Giuseppe was a legend within our squad, we decided that we should broadcast his wonders to the Internet, as the Internet has a sort of penchant for strange things, and Giuseppe was nothing short of strange.

Herman, Hamilton, and I were the ones who were most avid about social media and memes, but Hamilton wanted very little to do with Giuseppe (she thought he was interesting but a nuisance), so Herman and I continued on our own. Herman set up a Twitter account called RadGuiseppe (yes, she misspelled Giuseppe), and I set up an Instagram with the same name, except spelled correctly. I don’t have a Twitter, so I couldn’t supervise it, but I ran the Instagram account, which gained about twenty-five followers.

At that time, I was about two months into my Instagram career, cultivating around five thousand followers out of my eventual eight thousand until I deactivated it in August of that year, so it was simple enough to post a screenshot of Giuseppe’s Instagram profile, and ask people to follow him for some wholesome fun, and to become one of Giuseppe’s faithful servants or sacrifices.

Lots of the responses were welcoming of Giuseppe. Many threw themselves at his feet, willingly transforming themselves into either a servant or a sacrifice, whichever they chose. Only a few thought he was creepy (or at least publicly voiced it), but those were probably the ones who didn’t understand how wild the Internet is. The Internet veterans were very eager to submit themselves to this otherworldly doll, though.

Despite only having twenty-five followers, Giuseppe was a legend among the people he ruled.


	7. The Kickball Fall

Our sixth grade history teacher was quite the man. He tended to a bushy beard that he refused to shave until the next year, and his favorite pastime was writing songs about various strange topics, like unfortunate events concerning horses and falling fruits. One of his more notable songs, this one about his love for cheese, was the soundtrack to my pre-Halloween dinner with Haglet. His main focus was to be happy, which made him a very jubilant, fun person, to the point where he would allow us to play history kickball: the premise of the game is very similar to regular kickball, but you have to correctly answer a question about history before he rolls the ball to you to kick it, and it was a favorite among the students.

I was standing in the outfield with Haglet, which is my continuous position when the other team is batting due to my fear of participating in lots of sports, and Haglet noticed that this other girl (let’s call her Siracha Delaporte) was not even as enthusiastic as me. She wasn’t scared of playing sports as I was, yet she was still sitting in the outfield, lounging around as she sipped from her suburban girl water bottle with a built-in straw, which made her look very fashionable but very useless.

Haglet, annoyed that Siracha Delaporte was slacking off, pranced over to her in the creepy manner that she does, and demanded that she play. When Siracha Delaporte refused, Haglet exclaimed that she would be sacrificed to Giuseppe if she would not participate like the rest of us. Still, Siracha Delaporte refused, and Haglet dropped it for the day.

The next day, Haglet asked me to wait for her as she went to the bathroom in a building before recess, so I did. When she was done, we walked down the hall to go to the field, and it was there that we spotted Siracha Delaporte, filling out a sheet to schedule an appointment with the guidance counselor. Being the angry, grudge-holding person that she is, Haglet threatened once more that Giuseppe was coming for her, and Siracha Delaporte only told her to stop being so mean. Haglet didn’t think anything of it.

By the time I entered the car to go back home after school the next day, I had learned that Haglet was called into the guidance counselor’s office with Siracha Delaporte, because the other girl was offended that we joked about her being a sacrifice to Giuseppe. Siracha Delaporte’s mother had called and tattled on Haglet, so she was forced to talk through it with the guidance counselor.

This news was brought to my attention as we were driving home, as Haglet’s mother had heard about it from the guidance counselor, and was furious about it. She was very disappointed in her daughter, who claimed that she didn’t do anything worthy of the punishments she received, yet the woman still persisted. She told us to never speak of Giuseppe again, which would be difficult, considering Giuseppe was the center of our worlds at that point, but we pretended as though we could do it.

However, the drama did not cease.


	8. Restraining Order

It was after this whole Giuseppe sacrifice scandal that Anna stopped hanging out with us, and began to even avoid us. Now, this is a somewhat natural thing to do when you have a falling out with someone, no matter how silly it was. People hold grudges; that’s human nature. However, it didn’t seem as though Siracha Delaporte was holding a grudge. It was something different, and we intended to find out what it was.

When we confronted Siracha Delaporte, she was a bit oblique about it, but we eventually discovered that her mom saw us as bad influences, and had told her to stop consorting with us. That’s something typical of parents to do. They’ll always tell you that you’ll be judged by the people with whom you surround yourself, and it’s oftentimes a true statement. This was an example of that, though it wasn’t Siracha Delaporte’s choice, or so it seemed. It appeared as though she still longed to hang out with us, even after the Giuseppe incident, but her mom was otherwise disposed, and until you’re eighteen, your parents’ decisions are the ones that dictate you most frequently.

Granny Smith considered writing an extremely polite letter in order to convince Siracha Delaporte’s mother to allow her to hang out with us again, but she ultimately decided against it, and Siracha Delaporte broke away.

That was the first of our friends to go.


	9. Hamilton's Qualms

From the very beginning, Hamilton had always been skeptical of the whole Giuseppe business. She refused to go beyond what was expected of her, which was usually passing the doll around when it landed on her spot at the table at lunch, and she frequently told us that we were being obnoxious or too extra when it came to Giuseppe. She was cautious, I suppose, and not very fervent about our dark lord, so it was a miracle that she continued to sit with us.

That is, until she didn’t.

Hamilton has always been the person to change up her seating arrangements to be friendly with everyone in the grade, but she still sat with us a lot. However, it came to a point where she moved to other places more often than she already did, and she eventually stopped sitting with us completely. We didn’t exactly know why, but we could guess that it was because of Giuseppe. We could all recognize that the situation had gotten out of hand — Haglet had already gotten in trouble with her mom and the guidance counselor, and we had already lost Siracha Delaporte — but we were nevertheless invested in Giuseppe, even if we had said goodbye to two of our friends because of it.

Maybe the dark lord was better at possession than we had thought.


	10. Plans of Murder

What was left of our squad soon realized that something had to be done about Giuseppe. We had relinquished our friends and our stability with authority figures in favor of an inanimate doll, so we decided that Giuseppe must die.

We ultimately agreed that we would give Giuseppe to Herman to burn at her grandpa’s house, a place with a fire pit perfect for what we sought. Another popular opinion was to venture to my house, and hold cult-like ceremony before submerging Giuseppe in the creek. Both plans were obstructed by something, but we’ll get into that later.

I once announced our plans of murder on my Instagram within my regularly long captions, an account that my dad had discovered in early April, which happened to be after the time I had given a shout-out to Giuseppe, so he scolded me for including homicide in a twelve year old’s friendly Instagram — my Instagram wasn’t even that friendly; it was a sinful account of terrible fandom memes that I created with somewhat superb editing skills — and I deleted that portion of the caption, but lots of my followers had already seen that I was out to drown my former dark lord in the creek outside of my house.

Nonetheless, the evil would soon be defeated.


	11. Giuseppe Sympathizer

Herman invited Haglet and me over to her house for a slumber party, which are always disastrously hilarious, and usually end up with us awake at three o’clock in the morning, plotting more complex ways to sin than the prior engagement, so we have the best of times.

At the kitchen table, we were discussing all things Giuseppe: how Hamilton had split away from us because of him, how Siracha Delaporte left as well, how we were planning to murder him, and all of the sudden, Herman’s mother piped up from the kitchen, begging us not to kill the wretched doll. We asked her why she would rather live in a world full of evil than see it destroyed, and she claimed that she found Giuseppe to be adorable, and she wouldn’t want him gone.

We were rightfully appalled. It seemed that Giuseppe had possessed Herman’s mother, too, and he was only growing stronger by the minute. We needed to act quickly, or else be slaughtered by the monster we created.


	12. Giuseppe's Abduction

In order to keep an eye on our monstrous rogue, Giuseppe was passed from person to person among Herman, Haglet, and me. He would travel with us home, hopefully hid in the closet during the nighttime so he wouldn’t murder us, and would be brought back to school the following day to hitchhike on whomever was next in line. It was sort of an Olympic sport not to be possessed or slaughtered by this hellish creature, but we survived.

Haglet started with Giuseppe, and then it was passed onto me. I then gave it to Herman, the most challenging of destinations because of her biased mother. Who knows what she could do with Giuseppe? Who knows what she and Giuseppe could do to Herman _together_? You can never know with people who held as much power as that doll.

Haglet and I had both survived a night with Giuseppe, but Herman was not so lucky. No, she wasn’t murdered by the thing, but our plans to destroy Giuseppe were thwarted by the mother possessed. At some point during Giuseppe’s stay with Herman, he was abducted by the other woman living within those quarters. Herman’s mother was so passionate about Giuseppe’s life that she stole him like a vandal in the night so that we couldn’t obliterate him like he should rightfully be obliterated. We didn’t know what to do, but we couldn’t just allow Herman’s own mother to fall victim to something that was our fault.

However, there was nothing we could do, because Herman’s mom loved Giuseppe too much to return him to us, and that was that. She hid the monster so that we couldn’t sneak him away from her, and continue what we meant to do with that devil. Fortunately, Herman’s mother survived, but we never saw Giuseppe again. For all we know, he could have escaped to pursue chaos elsewhere, and we would never know.

Maybe Giuseppe escaped and joined ISIS, or maybe he will find us again.


	13. Giuseppe's Reincarnation

The next year, in seventh grade, there was a new student who came to our school (let’s call him the White Devil). He and Haglet began dating for a month or so (unbeknownst to me until I eavesdropped on someone else discussing it with their friends), but they broke up after some time, though we still chilled with him often.

One day in the library’s aforementioned Maker Space during a free activity period, Haglet and I retold the story of Giuseppe to the White Devil and the three other people who spent their time with us during those activity sessions. They were very amused by this quite horrifying story.

Later, Haglet and I realized that the White Devil could very well be the reincarnation of our lost Giuseppe, and thus we began to call him that. He was beyond confused, despite having heard the story, and I was honestly perplexed as to how he was the reincarnation of Giuseppe, but I went along with it because it seemed to annoy him, and he had already offended me by getting a haircut that looked like a gradient eyebrow.

I’m always enthusiastic about doing weird things, whether they be for dares or for fun, so I went out of my way to call him Giuseppe. At someone’s bar mitzvah, I chased him around with a picture of the doll pulled up on my phone, and he insisted that he wasn’t the thing we said he was, but we of course knew better than to trust a monster like Giuseppe.

It’s evident that he doesn’t like me, but I never leave him alone, and that’s just the way things are. I don’t think reincarnations of Giuseppe should receive special treatment, anyway.


	14. Side Effects

Despite witnessing the consequences of Giuseppe’s presence while he wasn’t MIA as he is now, there remain to be permanent side effects of the whole scandal. For example, Hamilton hasn’t sat with us since she first departed in sixth grade, and I don’t think she’s even said a word to me, either, even if she’s extremely talkative with other people. Siracha Delaporte has become better friends with us after Giuseppe was, in a way, vanquished slightly, but we don’t hang out with her as much as we did, which still wasn’t often; she was resting in between a third tier and second tier friend. Giuseppe is also now the home screen on my phone, and has been for a few months, because I haven’t taken the time to change it to something else (but is there anything better than Giuseppe on your phone, honestly?). In the time that Giuseppe was still here, we tried creating a feminine version of him named Gurka, but she was quickly misplaced. We are still kind of searching.

This is by far my favorite story to tell, so I’m glad to have shared it with you. Thank you for not dying halfway through from the terror of Giuseppe.


End file.
